


Anything You Want Or Need

by FyrMaiden



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, M/M, Meet-Cute, Strippers & Strip Clubs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-06 23:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4239942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FyrMaiden/pseuds/FyrMaiden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last place Blaine expects to find happiness is in the back room of a strip club, and yet…</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anything You Want Or Need

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2015 Kurt-Blaine Reverse Bang.
> 
> There is a brief ( _brief_ ) mention of Finn's death, but only in passing.
> 
> Title lifted, not that it bears any significance, specifically, to this story, from Ray Kurzweil’s [ ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83533.The_Age_of_Spiritual_Machines</a). (I could elaborate on why I’m choosing a phrase from a sentient AI to title a story about sex work, but I’m sure it’s fairly obvious, really.) Also, massive thanks to misqueue for going through this for me and helping to make it something that actually _works_ instead of just floundering uselessly in endless middle. My gratitude is truly bottomless.

_Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love. How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love? Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with that special girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. That's relativity. -Albert Einstein_

  
_You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar when I met you…_

Blaine Anderson isn't supposed to be sitting in a dead car on an abandoned street in suburban Ohio. He's supposed to be drinking overpriced alcohol in an airport lounge, waiting for his flight back to his home and his actual life. He checks his phone, and the battery flicks from 7% to dead just as he unlocks it. He blinks slowly and breathes through his nose, and then reaches for his bag to find his charger, only to find it isn't there and is, probably, still at his mother's house. He can't even call her to ask her to check, or to mail it to him. He pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs, closes his eyes against the rain and mutters a curse into the cool recirculated air. 

Beyond the windshield, the rain – which has been a steady drizzle the entire time he has been in town with his mom – turns predictably into a downpour, hammering a miserable tattoo on the glass, and he sits and watches for a moment. It is, he thinks, as he pulls his jacket over his head and throws the door of the car open, proof that there is absolutely no god. No higher power is watching over him today. He is, he decides, as he steps out of the car into the sticky humidity of the late evening summer rain - right into a puddle that splashes over the top of his shoe and ruins an almost new pair of $5000 bespoke Oxfords - completely alone down here. Just the same as everybody else. 

He swears again, slams the car door, and dashes across the street and beneath the awning of the only place that he can see in this cow town that looks open. In his shoes, his bare feet swim in what feels like sludge, uncomfortable and disgusting, and he’s sure he can feel gel dripping down the back of his neck, collecting tacky in his collar. It’s awful. He straightens his jacket with a firm tug, grimaces at the pants which are stuck to his thighs, and thinks again: If there were a God, he’d have a cell with a battery that actually lasted one goddamn day. He has work back in New York that he needs to get to, has a meeting he has to make that could change his life, and if he even makes his flight, he’ll be shocked. He’ll be amazed, even. But right now, he’s stuck beneath the awning of the one place open at this time of day, with the keys to a car that won’t start in one hand, his wallet in his breast pocket, and a dead phone. 

He takes a deep breath, exhales to the count of ten. “Namaste, Blaine,” he tells himself. Calm. This is not even close to the worst day ever. He’d know; he has a lot of worst days in the bank, although most of them are ten years and longer in the past. This day is bad, but he knows already that it’ll be an interview story in a couple of months, something he laughs about. He hopes so, anyway. 

In the water streaming down the gutters, the buzzing pink sign above the awning flashes its name back at him, blurred and illegible but bright and inviting all the same. The door behind him opens and music spills into the quiet street before the door whispers closed once more. Silence reclaims the space around him. There’s nothing for it. He needs a phone, and a drink, and somewhere to sit whilst he tries to assess his next move. A bar wouldn’t have been his first choice, but there will be whiskey and soda and, if he gets lucky, a fun way to waste an evening. 

Besides, it’s either the bar or a long walk back to his childhood home, and he’s got enough rain in his shoes already. 

He turns and pushes the door behind him open, and slips anonymously inside.  
  
  
  


_I was working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, that much is true…_

Kurt Hummel enters the club through the staff entrance, a non-descript gray door in a non-descript alley. The door is sandwiched between overflowing dumpsters and the rusted metal skeleton of a fire escape. He enjoys how much of a cliché the staff entrance is, irrespective of the prices the clientele pay for expensive imported drinks and a glimpse of flesh in the front. 

He enjoys that there’s a staff entrance at all, and that he doesn’t have to weave through the tables and the lascivious smiles if he doesn’t want to. Most days, he doesn’t. 

As a teen, Kurt had had grand ideas of leaving Ohio behind him. He and his best friend had a plan – they were going to New York City for college. They were going to get into the same performing arts program, graduate side by side, and take the world by storm. 

Kurt has learned a lot, since he was 16, about the sacrifices required of adulthood. He’d made the college short list, had auditioned for a place, and then – then he hadn’t actually made it, after all. He hadn’t made the cut, and hadn’t applied to back up schools either. Instead, he had shelved his plans and focused on graduating in one piece from high school, figuring that he would have time after that to figure out his next move. He could, he thought, always just go to the city and find his feet once he was there. 

He hadn’t managed that either. He’d graduated the same as everyone else, had even sold his car and had the money together to go. He’d triaged his belongings, had them boxed and stored, and his dad knew which ones to send him when he called to say he had an address to send them to. He was ready. 

He never made his flight. His dad’s health took a blow that reminded him that he couldn’t take anything for granted, and that included the time he might have left with the people he loved, and he’d changed his plans entirely. He took a place at the community college, found himself a job at the local coffee shop, and told himself that New York would still exist in a year. He’d give his dad a year, and then he’d go. 

A year changes a lot of things, though. A year throws a lot of unexpected and ugly surprises at a person. His brother died that year, and Kurt learned that he couldn’t control the world. He could, however, control the space immediately around him. He rented an apartment in Lima, chose a degree path in college, and learned that he couldn’t pay his rent on minimum wage and tips alone. 

He was having lunch with Brittany when she told him that there was work going at a bar in Lima Heights. The money was good, and no one asked a lot of questions. She scribbled the address on a napkin in blue kohl, and pressed a cherry chapstick kiss to his cheek as she left. 

_The Pink Umbrella._

He knew the place, knew exactly what it was, and had called them up anyway. 

It’s not exactly what he’d pictured for himself as an idealistic and lonely 15 year old, and yet it feels almost inevitable. He’s 25 years old, taking a part time degree in the town he grew up in, and he performs burlesque on weekends for a crowd that comes almost exclusively because his name - or the one he uses here, anyway - is on the fliers poster bombed around town. 

A stage is, he says, always a stage. And he owns the one he performs on. 

Still, he promises himself that he’ll leave Lima behind one day, set his sights on something bigger, something brighter. A bigger stage, his name - his _real_ name - in lights, the headline act of his very own show. One where he gets to keep his clothes on, even. 

But for now, there’s The Umbrella, and, pink or not, it pays his bills and buys his clothes and keeps him in college, and that’s good enough. 

It’s good enough.  
  
  
  


_I picked you out I shook you up and turned you around…_

Beyond the heavy doors, the music is loud. There is a doorman standing behind a booth who holds up a hand for Blaine’s ID. Blaine pats his pocket for his wallet and produces his driver’s licence. The doorman looks at it and looks at him and nods his head just once, up and down, brusque and surly, and gestures for him to continue. Blaine reclaims his ID and pushes open the interior door, lighter and easier to manage, and heads inside. 

It’s not what he’d expected from the outside of the place, or from the location. The decor is expensive, sumptuous and comfortable and a deep red that seems to pulse with the music, a muscle drawing him in and holding him close. Already conscious of the effects the rain have had on his hair and his clothes, Blaine stares around himself, dumbstruck and in awe, taking in the dancers, male and female, masked and not, on their pedestals. He can feel the blush that warms his cheeks, and laughs at himself. He’s not 18 anymore. He should be years past blushing at cute boys in tiny gold shorts just because he can see everything they have to offer and can vividly imagine the roll of their bodies against his own, hot and sweaty and incredibly vulgar. He coughs and feels the burning in his ears, turns away and heads for the bar, expensive shoes tapping a rapid tattoo on the equally expensive floor. 

Blaine takes a stool at the bar, orders an Old Fashioned from the bartender, a beautiful woman with thick dark hair that tumbles down her back in waves and a dress so tight that that he can only assume she rolled it on from the bottom up, and she arches one perfect eyebrow at him but makes his drink without comment. The dress clings to her thighs and emphasises her hips and waist and ass, and, when she leans forward to slides his glass toward him with one lethal looking nail, he has a perfect view straight down the front of her dress, the swell of her breasts alluring and right there, inches from his face. Blaine closes his eyes and turns his head away, and she laughs. “Ah,” she says. “You’re one of _them_.” Blaine opens his mouth to ask exactly what she means, just as the music changes. 

"Just in time," she says, her eyebrows arching suggestively into her bangs. "You picked your moment." 

"I'm not-" Blaine says. "I didn't-" 

She presses her finger to her lips. "This is why everyone comes, sailor. To fall in love with him for a night at a time." 

"My car broke down," Blaine tries, but she shakes her head, and Blaine gives up. He takes his tumbler, sips his drink, and watches the stage instead.  
  
  
  


Blaine doesn’t know what to expect. The bar is just a dry port in a raging storm, but the atmosphere changes with the music. The lighting, warm and inviting until now, changes to a cold harsh blue. The room holds its collective breath, and he can feel his own breath trapped inside of him as well, suffocating him. He can’t remember how to exhale, though, and his head swims with the anticipation. The music, background noise to him before, becomes a heavy sweaty swell, an electronic pulse that twists into his own, and then there’s someone on the stage, a mask covering the face and a short cape wrapped around their body, and Blaine wouldn’t like to judge but the girl working the bar said he and him. Blaine can’t see much that isn’t long bare legs and armadillo heels. The barest flash of rhinestones as the man on the stage moves, bends, dances, teases, as he bares one shoulder and teases with a hint of his spine, as the music continue to pump and pulse to its crescendo. 

The man’s cloak hits the floor just as the song ends and the lights flare and brighten, and he’s standing with his back to his audience, turns at the waist to glance over his shoulder as his audience. Blaine has to admire the lean power of his thighs, and the tight swell of his ass in barely existent black shorts. He wants to drag his tongue up the crevice of his spine, to fit his thumbs into the dimples on his back, to see how well his fingers fit into the dip of hips and if his face would look good between those legs. He doesn’t remember to exhale until the man has gathered the bills from the floor and disappeared back behind the curtain. 

When the dance is over, Blaine turns back to the bartender. The way she looks at him is almost feral now, as if she knows him already, and has judged him wanting. She pushes a napkin across the bar toward him, and stands a second tumbler on it. “Old fashioned,” she says, and appraises him, her eyes dragging down and then back up again. When she speaks again, there’s a fondness beneath the bite. 

"He knew three moves in high school," she says, shimmies her shoulders and offers a wolfish grin and an arched eyebrow. Blaine tries not to notice the way her breasts bounce in the exposed scoop of her neckline. “The shoulder shimmy was always a favourite, and the finger wag. But let’s not rule out the one which looked like he had ribbons tied to his hips like some kind of repressed dancing marionette on strings.” 

If Blaine has managed to avoid staring at her chest, he loses the battle with her hips. He finds himself mesmerised by her as she demonstrates. He forces his eyes back to her face when she stops. He meets her eyes and she offers a laugh and shakes her head. “At some point between high school and now, I guess he learned how to fuck. Watch out world." 

Blaine's ears go hot again, and he forces himself to not picture that narrow, beautiful body sweaty and pink and hot against his own. He closes his eyes and sips his drink and swallows tightly as he loses the battle. When he looks again, the barmaid actually smiles at him. "You really didn't come for him, huh? That's a first. Your type usually want his name and leave when you find out." 

"Find out what?" 

"I'm gonna level with you, pockets, because you seem honest and your suit is expensive. You could have your choice of men, I'm sure. But not that one. He's for your eyes only." 

"My eyes only?" 

"As in, touch him and you'll never so much as touch your own dick again." 

Blaine finishes his drink in one swallow. "I don't even know his name." 

"Does it matter? You've seen him virtually naked and you know how he fucks. Leave it at that." 

He nods, and her smile comes back, and the blonde man from before resumes his position on one of the pedestals, hips thrusting and rotating suggestively. Blaine admires his abs, the roll of his body, the way he works the crowd shamelessly. He smells the bartender's perfume, heady and enticing, as she leans in behind him. 

"The mask is important to him," she says. "For when he makes it out of buttfuck, Ohio. The mask is his promise of a clean slate." 

"Who is he?" 

"Your favourite nightmare." She steps back, and Blaine turns his head, slides a twenty across the bar. 

"Keep the change," he says, and heads toward the stage.  
  
  
  


_But even then I knew I’d find a much better place…_

Once his first dance is over, Kurt slips off of the stage and out of sight. His skin glistens with oil and sweat, and he needs fresh air. He stops in his dressing room only for long enough to pull a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt on over his costume and to wrap a jacket around himself. He pulls his phone from his bag and grabs a bottle of water, and then he’s heading out of the staff door, breathing in the damp night air as he goes. 

Outside the back door, Kurt leans against the worn brick work, allows the cool to seep into his clothes and his bones. He exhales slowly, inhales again, and closes his eyes, lets his body relax and unwind around him. It’s quiet out here, the sound of the music and the thump of the bass duller and further away, and his heart is allowed to resume its own pace, not the acquired one it assumes inside. It’s calm, peaceful. He hums to himself as he stretches out his legs again, and rolls his head forward to release the tension from his neck. 

Beside him, the staff door crashes open, and a face appears. Kurt’s eyes open and he turns his attention toward it, and offers a smile when a pair of almond-shaped periwinkle blue eyes finds his. It’s Brittany, sometime dancer and occasional DJ, and their barmaid’s wife. She steps out into the alley and allows the door to swing closed behind her. It bounces on its latch, locked open so that they can get back in faster and more easily. 

“Santana says there’s a guy who might be your type,” she says, and Kurt represses his urge to turn and walk away from her. Santana tells him at least three times a night that there’s someone who might be his type, texts Britt from behind the bar with names and ages and which state their licence says they’re from. Kurt has her successes filed in his head like a rolodex of disappointment, and has learned caution and suspicion because of it. She cards them and flirts with them, and calls him a prude on the Saturday mornings when he wakes up alone, texts him to tell him he’ll die alone if he doesn’t pull the stick out of his goddamn ass. Does he know that condoms actually do have expiry dates? In its own way, it’s reassuring that she cares. He doesn’t need her help to pick up dates in a strip club, though. 

He sighs instead, and glances at Britt. She leans against the wall beside him and crosses her booted ankles. Her skirt is short, and wraps loosely around her hips, easy to pull away without damaging it. He loves her legs, the length and tone, and the strength of her thighs, and thinking about that means he doesn’t have to think about her and Santana meddling in his life again. She holds a candy cigarette between her fingers, and her usually inquisitive eyes are casually, deliberately disaffected when he meets them. He smiles, and she smiles back, and then she bites off the end of her cigarette and chews it slowly. 

“I’ve told you both before-” he says eventually, trying for arch but coming off amused. 

“-You don’t need our help,” Brittany says, her head bobbing. “I know. But Santana says he’s pretty.” Brittany pauses, and Kurt has known her for long enough to know that there are words that she isn’t saying. 

“Spit it out,” he says. 

“He’s not here for you,” she says, and leaves the words hanging in the air between them. They both know what those words mean. 

Minutes pass in silence, and then she shivers and rubs her arms, and Kurt is suddenly conscious of her bare midriff. He slips his arms from the sleeves of his jacket and hands it to her, and she wraps it around herself without really putting it on. The rain has eased off, but the alley is still damp. It’s not really cold, though, for all that. In the narrow strip of sky above them, stars are visible. If they looked up, they could name them, almost. Kurt’s not looking at the stars, though. He’s looking at Brittany. 

He’s loathe to admit that he’s interested. It’s been a long time, and a look won’t hurt. He pulls open the door and allows Brittany to enter ahead of him. She smiles and chews the rest of her cigarette, and he says, “Tell Santana to keep him at the bar.”  
  
  
  


Kurt changes again, slips into a pair of jeans so tight they’re almost a second skin and fusses with his hair in the bathroom mirror, brushes it and sprays it and examines it from every angle he can manage before huffing a sigh and staring at his skin instead. He feels blotchy and imperfect, and in his head he can hear his 15 year old self, whose skin really had needed all the help it could get, telling him that in this lighting, everyone looks bad. He blinks up at the harsh fluorescent of the tiny bathroom and wonders why he cares this much. He’s meeting no one, just another one night nobody. He’ll be a dance and a tip and another conversation with Santana in the morning whilst he buys coffee and catches up with school work. 

Santana catches his eye as he heads toward the bar, stands up straighter and motions with her head for him to join her. She’s talking with a patron, and Kurt can only see his back. Even so, it’s hard not to be impressed by the width of his shoulders and the cut of his suit. Santana laughs, genuine and honest, and her hand reaches for his forearm. He cocks his head, and Kurt can see the length of his neck, inviting and available. He hangs back and watches them, looks the man over, takes in his profile as he turns his head to gesture toward the door, and he’s reminded of a day so very long ago, a different boy in a different place who’d been so incredibly kind to him. This man, though - he’s cute, compact, with expensive shoes and an expensive wallet. Kurt hates to admit it, and wouldn’t tell Santana under torture conditions, but she’s right. From the back, with his hair gelled neatly and his trim waist and that ass when he leans in to whisper in Santana’s ear, he’s not an unappealing prospect. He smooths his own pants across his ass, and straightens his shirt, and adjust the mask that obscures his face, even here, even now. 

He exhales, and steps into small dark and handsome’s peripheral vision.  
  
  
  


_Turned you into someone new…_

Blaine doesn’t see him immediately, is still caught up telling the barmaid – Santana, she says, indicating herself - about his mom, and growing up in Lima, and how it seems preposterous that he lived just across the other side of town and was in show choir at his high school and doesn’t recognise her. “I was a Warbler,” he says, and she frowns and squints and shakes her head. 

“No,” she says. “I distinctly remember them singing the preppiest, most uptight version of Raise Your Glass I’ve ever had the misfortune to subject my ears to, and you don’t seem like that guy, Mr Old Fashioned.” 

He laughs and raises his glass to her, quirks an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth. “Dirty little freaks,” he sings, and she reaches for his arm, her eyes dancing with laughter that she doesn’t let touch her mouth, although he thinks he can see the pull of her lips. He likes her, he thinks, or he’d like to have had the chance to like her. Lima’s not home, though, and he doesn’t plan to stay. 

It’s only when Santana looks pointedly over his shoulder and moves away that Blaine stops and turns and sees the boy – man, this close, definitely – from the stage standing two feet from him, his eyes narrow behind the holes in his mask. He’s wearing jeans that look painted on, and Blaine can feel the way his eyes glue to his thighs and his hips and – and he tears them away, looks at his face. The man steps closer, and takes the seat beside him, and in the low lights of the bar, all Blaine can see are the stern angles of his cheeks and the flat line of his mouth, the piercing blue of his eyes staring straight through him. Blaine doesn’t really believe, but he feels like the man can read the lies in his heart, sitting here in silence. 

“Do you have a name?” the man asks him, and Blaine nods. 

“Blaine,” he replies, and then, “Anderson.” The man arches an eyebrow, and his mouth twitches as he huffs a laugh. Just that softens his face, and for a second he looks younger, more playful, and Blaine wants to know him better. “Do you have a name?” he asks, and the man shakes his head. 

“Not yet,” he says. A glass appears on the bar, and he reaches for it, sips the contents through a straw. He studies Blaine down the length of his nose, and Blaine wonders if he's meeting the standard required of him. He hopes so. The glass returns to the napkin on the bar, and Blaine drinks the last of his whiskey but holds onto his glass, just to do something with his hands. He watches the purse of the dancer’s lips and and the incline his head, and feels the crash of disappointment when he says, “It was nice meeting you, Blaine Anderson.” 

Blaine can feel how dry his mouth is as he watches that ass walk away.  
  
  
  


It's Santana who slips a note across the bar to him with a smirk and lascivious waggle of her eyebrows. “Someone has an admirer, Old Fashioned,” she says. “There's a dance and it's all for you.” 

He can feel the frown on his face and stares at her for a long moment. “Who?” he says, and she pulls a face at him, says without speaking that the question isn't worth her effort to answer. 

“Santa Claus,” she says, and then, “Remember, kiddo. No touching.”  
  
  
  


There's a curtain, and a private room, and the man from the bar but without his jeans again, and up close Blaine can see the glitter on his skin, refracting the light so he sparkles like diamonds. The music is softer, warmer, easier, and the couch has seen a thousand asses, and still it's like this dance is different somehow. The man has legs that go on forever, and a waist that Blaine wants to wrap his hands around, and there's nowhere to hide in the shorts he has on, riding low on hips that Blaine wants to taste, and he swivels and pivots and doesn't speak and Blaine drags his eyes back up to meet swirling kaleidoscope blue ones that are pinned to his face. 

He's aware of the rules of their interaction, knows he can look but isn't invited to touch. His fingers itch against the fabric of his pants, though, curl and press and beg against his own thigh. He wants to run his hands through perfect sweep of his hair; he longs to feel the hard lines of his biceps, to trace the definition of his muscles with his tongue. He wants to cover his body with his mouth, wants to taste him and feel him and feel him come undone, and he can’t have any of it, not even when his hips grind forward, not even when his long, strong hands touch himself, when he thumbs edge the waist of his shorts dangerously low. 

Blaine knows his eyes are glassy, knows that this is the least classy thing he’s done (and he has a list of not-classy things), and he knows that, if he were breathing at all he’d be actually panting. The man's body sways and moves, and his eyes lock with Blaine’s, and Blaine’s hands give up fighting against the raging want that eddies within him. 

The dancer throws his head back and he laughs, lets himself be hauled forward, his arms winding around Blaine’s neck. “Is your car really broken?” he says, and Blaine can't bring himself to wonder how he knows, only buries his nose in his skin, sweat damp and still smelling glorious. He sighs and kisses softly and looks back up. The other man's hands are strong on his shoulders, and there's something being offered in the unrelenting look that locks with his own. 

“It really is,” he says. “I’m supposed to be on a plane.” 

The dancer nods, presses his lips into a line and inclines his head. “What are your options?” 

Blaine shrugs and shakes his head, runs his hands up the spine that's so invitingly naked beneath them, and thinks about him with his clothes on at the bar, how he’d been so different to the man he’s touching now. The man he has twenty more minutes with, if he’s lucky. “I find a taxi and a hotel for the night, and sort this out in the morning.” 

“Come home with me,” says the man in his lap, his voice breathy and high and Blaine shakes his head because this seems like a terrible idea, no matter how much his body tells him yes. “Please?” 

“What's your name?” Blaine asks again, and this time the man stops moving, sits perfectly still for a moment. Then he reaches up and unties his mask, pulls it away from his face and quirks his lips up into a smile. 

“Kurt,” he says, and steps back, puts a little distance between them, and Blaine lets his eyes take in the angles of his face and the vulnerability in his eyes and he feels his heart stop in a way that’s too familiar and entirely unplaceable. “We met once before, a long time ago. And I'd like it, very much, if you'd come home with me.” 

Blaine Anderson is many things, has spent too long trying to find something he doesn’t really know he’s lost, but one thing he is not is two times a fool. He nods his head and breathes out through his nose, and then Kurt is leaving through a door at the back of the room and Blaine is heading back into the main bar, rumpled and unkempt and very much unsure of who he is.  
  
  
  


Blaine doesn’t return immediately to the bar. He stops in the restroom first, runs his fingers under the water and uses it to tame the curls breaking free from the hold of his gel. He looks damp, he thinks, straightening his jacket and stepping back to examine the effects the rain have had on his suit. In Kurt’s shoes, he wouldn’t have invited him anywhere. He looks bedraggled and ill-maintained. A few days of summer sun, though, have brought out the glow of his skin, and that is good. He remembers, staring at his hands, a boyfriend he’d had during his junior year of high school, who’d loved to tell him that he looked good with a little colour in him. 

(‘You look like a reanimated corpse in winter, B,’ he’d said, repeatedly and often. ‘I didn’t chase you down to wind up fucking Nosferatu’s younger brother.’ He’d smiled a lot, as if that changed the words, and nullified Blaine’s objections with his clever mouth and silver tongue. 

He’d taken Blaine to a tanning studio one weekend before Christmas. ‘I’m not taking you to my father’s party looking like you’d scare Casper,’ he’d explained, and thrust a pair of goggles at him. ‘Wear these.’ Blaine had felt oddly unlike himself after, but his boyfriend had smiled and held his hand and gone down on him, which was different, and then helped him change his sheets from white to green. ‘It’ll help hide the carnage,’ he grinned, and kissed him on the mouth before checking the time on his phone. ‘Shit, B. I’ve gotta blaze. I’ll catch you Monday.’) 

It’s been a long time since the fake tan and needy boys who hadn’t known how needy they were, though, and he’s learned a lot in the intervening years, about himself and his heart and how best to protect it, and how to say no and mean it. 

He doesn’t want to say no tonight, though, not to anything. He means every part of the yes that lingers on his lips and in his ears. He smooths the fabric of his pants once more and closes his eyes, and heads back toward the bar. Santana greets him with bottled water and a lascivious grin. “I knew it,” she says, as if she has a sixth sense, or maybe feline hormones that can smell sex on someone’s skin. Blaine frowns and inclines his head, and cracks open the water to take a sip. It’s cool in his mouth, and he caps it again to press it to his throat. 

“Has anyone ever told you that gloating is unattractive?” Blaine says, but his smile betrays him. 

“Sure,” she says and shrugs a shoulder. “But when I’m right, I’m right. I knew you’d be his type, pockets. It’s been a while but he’s real predictable.” 

“Thank… you?” Blaine offers, slowly. She rolls her eyes. 

“Wait here. He’ll come for you.” 

Blaine doesn’t have to tell her that he knows, and she’s walking away from him regardless.  
  
  
  


Kurt appears at his elbow just as he runs out of water. “Hey,” he says, his voice soft and his hair high, his shoulders broad beneath the shirt stretched across them. Blaine wants to touch him, but isn’t sure if he should. Kurt doesn’t strike him as someone who likes to be touched without invitation. 

“Hey,” he says back, and smiles wide and easy and feels it in his chest when the corners of Kurt’s mouth flick up in response. 

“You can say if you’ve changed your mind,” Kurt says to him. “I can close my eyes and you can walk away.” Blaine watches as his eyes snap shut, and he reaches for Kurt’s hand. 

“I’m not leaving,” he says, softly, gently. He has nowhere else to go, but more than that, he doesn’t want to. He wants to know Kurt’s secrets, or the ones his body keeps at least. Kurt’s eyes reopen slowly, and he breathes out, looks Blaine up and down and then wraps his fingers back around Blaine’s. He calls to Santana that he’s clocking out for the night, and she nods her head, indicates that she’ll call him, and then his attention is all on Blaine again. 

“Do you need anything from your car?” he asks, and Blaine says he should probably grab his bag at least. Kurt’s smile flicks on and then slides away, and Blaine doesn’t know him enough to judge the sadness in his eyes. 

Once they are outside, though, and he has taken a deep breath, the set of his shoulders changes. He stands a little taller, and the grip of his hand is firmer, and Blaine indicates the abandoned sedan sitting in a puddle across the street. It’s late now, dark, and the sign overhead buzzes, the bright neon illuminating the broken car. “Go,” Kurt says, and Blaine checks for traffic before running across to retrieve his bag before locking the car and coming back. 

“Where do you-” he begins, just as Kurt nods his head in the opposite direction, “My car is just-” and they both laugh, the tension fraying as they share the moment. 

“You first,” Blaine says, and Kurt turns up the corner of his mouth. 

“My car is back this way,” he says, and Blaine curls his hand around Kurt’s fingers once more, just as the rain begins again. 

He feels like a teenager, running through the rain with a boy he barely knows. In a way, it’s liberating.  
  
  
  


Kurt’s apartment is small, but well appointed. He takes Blaine’s jacket and hangs it on a hook by the door, beside his and an array of scarves in various colours. There’s a dog leash, but Blaine doesn’t hear a dog. Kurt removes his shoes, and Blaine does the same, and then Kurt leads him, barefoot and silent, into the kitchen. 

“Can I get you a drink?” he asks, and Blaine shakes his head. 

“Just water?” he says, and Kurt nods. The faucet is loud in the silence, and Kurt makes a shush noise at that Blaine thinks is adorable before handing him a glass. Blaine drinks in silence, watches Kurt watch him, and stands the glass in the sink when it's empty. Kurt's smile is soft, just the corners of his mouth turned up, and Blaine thinks he looks young, suddenly, more nervous here in his own home than he had been in the middle of the Umbrella, wearing substantially less clothes than he has on now, and with substantially more eyes on him. 

The silence stretches long and even, and Blaine begins to feel the tension creep into its edges. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his dead and useless phone, spins it around in his palm for a moment, and then, “Do you-” just as Kurt huffs a laugh at him. 

“Did you agree to come with me just to charge that?” he asks. Blaine's eyebrows shoot up in horrified consternation. 

“No -” he starts, but Kurt's shoulders are shaking, and he has a hand covering his mouth. With more time to spare, Blaine would love to see that laugh a thousand times, learn how to make that a reality. He doesn't have more time, though. He has tonight. 

Once Blaine's phone is plugged in, Kurt inclines his head toward what Blaine can only assume is his bedroom. Blaine nods in response. 

“Yeah,” he says, and smiles. Kurt smiles in response and holds out his hand again. 

It seems like a small gesture, but it feels immense. Holding hands. He hasn't held anyone's hand like this in far too long. He lets Kurt lead him across the hall and close the door behind them, and loses himself in the moment.  
  
  
  


_Either with or without you…_

It’s light when Kurt blinks awake, but the numbers on the clock indicate that it is still early. He doesn’t have to move to know that he’s alone. Wishing for the morning to be different won’t change it, and he felt Blaine leave, heard the quiet click of his bedroom door even as he tried to cling to the hope he’d felt the night before. He closes his eyes against the intrusion of reality, and counts his own breaths. In, out. In, out. 

When he looks again, the minutes have barely changed, but he does see that Blaine’s clothes are still on his floor. It’s not much, but it’s something to hang on to. He pushes himself upright, gathers mismatched sleepwear from his drawer, and steps cautiously into his own hallway. 

Blaine is standing in his kitchen, his phone in his hand as he scrolls through his messages. He’s leaning against the counter in just his underwear, familiar and comfortable and Kurt wants for that to be true. His face looks tighter than it did before though, more drawn than it did last night, and Kurt wants - he wants a lot, he realises. He wants to know how to erase the frown drawing Blaine’s eyebrows down and flat, that’s creasing his face the way is, and he wants to know how to say goodbye to him in their rapidly dwindling minutes together, and he doesn’t know how to do any of the things that surface and sink in his mind without breaking some fragile part of himself. 

The door clicks shut behind him, and Blaine’s head raises, turns to face him. His smile is warm, and Kurt feels like he must be a mess. No one sees him like this, his pajama pants puddled around his feet and the buttons of his Grandad collar t-shirt undone. Blaine lowers his phone, and places it back on the counter beside him. 

“Did I wake you?” he says, his voice quiet in the hush, and Kurt shakes his head. It’s a lie, but it’s a comfortable one. His eyes trail over Blaine’s body, and he feels he’d be more embarrassed if Blaine wasn’t appraising him with the same open desire on his face. Blaine breaks the stare first, presses a button on his phone and Kurt watches as his shoulders drop. 

“Do you even have time for coffee?” he asks, and Blaine shakes his head but doesn’t look up. 

“Not really,” he says. There’s a sadness beneath the words, and Kurt would like to never hear that again. When he does raise his head, his eyes are wet and his mouth is pressed into a tight line. “I just need to-” 

Kurt nods and points down the hall. “Bathroom,” he says, and then, “I can, um. I can help you. With the car.” 

“Yeah?” 

Kurt nods. “Mm, yeah. My dad’s a mechanic.” 

Blaine nods his head, and Kurt yawns and covers his mouth, laughs at himself as he lowers his hand. “I’ll just - find something to wear. While you wash. Then we can get you going.” 

It takes him less than twenty minutes to dress, and he emerges from his room in old jeans and a sweater that is less authentically old than carefully designed to look grungy and destroyed. He pulls a hat down over his hair and grabs his keys from the counter, and waits for Blaine to emerge from the bathroom. 

When Blaine does appear, he’s changed from his suit into jeans that hug his hips and a shirt that emphasises the width of his shoulders and the nip of his waist, and Kurt feels the stop and skip of his heart. Blaine doesn’t speak as he folds his suit into his bag, or as he pulls last night’s shoes onto bare feet, and Kurt doesn’t know what to say either. Everything he could say, or wants to say, feels loaded and dangerous.   
  
  
  


They don't speak on the journey back to the rental car. Blaine hums along to the radio, and Kurt listens to him, but there seem to be no words that are fitting for the weight settling over him. 

He can’t even say whether Blaine’s smile seems genuinely sad, or if he’s projecting his own wishes onto him. 

Kurt tries to eke out fixing the car, but it still takes less than twenty minutes. Blaine leans against the wing and watches him, and Kurt finds himself imagining that they have all morning, that - once the car is running again - they’ll drive to the Lima Bean and split a cookie and - 

“Turn it on,” he says, standing upright. Blaine rouses himself and gets in. He turns the key and the car roars back to life, the radio loud in the still of the morning. Kurt offers a tight smile and drops the hood, places his hands on it as Blaine gets out of the car again. 

“It probably just got wet,” Kurt says, and Blaine nods without much conviction. Kurt retrieves his bag from the back of his own car and hands it to him, and Blaine stores it safely in the trunk. Kurt watches him with his arms folded across his chest, as if he can armour himself against the inevitable by force of will. The first time they met, he’d done the driving away, and he’s learned to live with that choice, with the regret. 

It doesn’t stop him wishing he could change it this time, that he could remind Blaine who he is, or who he could have been, or - 

“I should go,” Blaine says, and gestures to the car and probably mean back to his life, the one waiting for him at the other end of a flight. Kurt forces a smile onto his face and nods. 

“Will you be back?” he asks, and wishes he could take the words back even as Blaine starts to shake his head. 

“I don’t know. My mom -” In his pocket, his phone starts to ring. Kurt backs away and waves, or wiggles his fingers. 

“I’ll let you go,” he says. “Bye, Blaine.” 

He doesn’t stop to hear anything else Blaine says, only pulls open the door to his car and climbs in. 

History, he decides, is doomed to repeat itself. 

Because he’s _still_ the one driving away.  
  
  
  


His phone rings just as he’s letting himself into his dad’s house, vibrating insistently in his pocket. He ignores it, choosing instead to crouch down to greet the small black dog that hurls herself at his legs. He scratches her ears and wrinkles his nose as she licks his face before pushing her away and standing. His dog bounces and weaves around his legs as he heads for the kitchen, pours himself milk from the refrigerator and sits at the table. Two paws land on his leg, and he lifts her to his lap and buries his face in her neck, allows himself to be comforted by her presence before returning her to the floor. In his pocket, his phone buzzes again, and he checks it this time. 

Santana. 

He lets it go to voicemail again. 

There are conversations he doesn’t want to have, and he doesn’t want to talk about Blaine to her. Not this time. Not yet. He needs to let himself forget him again first. 

Because there was a time, when he was 16, when Blaine had been everything he wanted to be - handsome, self-assured, popular, _and out_. Kurt met him once, had one conversation with him, over coffee, and had missed a digit from his number when he wrote it down. 

Couldn’t go back to Dalton Academy for a number. 

Couldn’t _go_ to Dalton. 

And so he’d tried to forget him, and had, slowly. By the time he was 19, the could-have-been that was a cute boy in a red-piped blazer was a memory, blurry with time and mostly forgotten. He didn’t know his last name until he saw him profiled in one of his magazines, had run his fingers over his face and known it was him, intervening decade aside. 

Santana can’t know how accurate she’d been this time. Not just his type, but the boy - man - who’d started it all. 

Kurt starts, sitting at his Dad’s kitchen table, the exact same way he’d done before, the onerous task of forgetting Blaine Anderson a second time. 

He also promises himself that he will actually get out of Ohio this time as well.  
  
  
  


_It’s much too late to find, when you think you’ve changed your mind…_

_‘Do you even have time for coffee?’_

Blaine shakes his head, tries to clear the words, tries to focus on the road, on getting to the airport, but his brain buzzes uncomfortably with the question, within the echo chamber of memory. 

_Coffee._

It feels big, bigger than just a drink. When he blinks, he sees Kurt’s eyes staring at him, full of questions. Kurt, as he looked this morning, soft and vulnerable and - and _scared_. 

Did Kurt look scared this morning? 

Blaine isn’t aiming for it, but he’s also not surprised when he finds himself pulling into the parking lot of a place he’d haunted with his homework and pretentions about biscotti when he was 15 and couldn’t take boys home. When he was 15 and hadn’t had a boy to take home. When he was 15, and home was fraught with tension and arguments and one or both of his parents not _quite_ blaming him for _the way things were._

The Lima Bean. 

They’d served Lima Bean coffee in the cafeteria at his high school. He remembers discovering that his first week there, remembers the look on Kurt’s face when he saw the cups, the day he snuck in - 

He kills the engine of the car and stares at his hands on the wheel, horror settling in his chest. 

The day Kurt snuck in. 

_‘We met once before, a long time ago.’_

Blaine almost feels like he could throw up.  
  
  
  


His phone sounds loud when it rings, and he answers it automatically, his breathing mechanical as his manager’s voice blasts from the car’s stereo. “Blaine?” she says, when he doesn’t respond to a question he hasn’t heard. “Blaine, answer me.” 

“I’m here,” he says, and she snorts a laugh. 

“Where is here?” 

“I’m still in Ohio,” he says. “I missed my flight.” 

She swears, vitriolic and abrasive, and Blaine doesn’t listen. Then she tells him he can’t just vanish like this - he could be dead. He could be in a fucking ditch. He thinks, this is a woman who has clearly never been to Ohio. In Ohio, they’d still use a tire iron, or brute force, or just superior numbers. 

He shakes it off. It’s been twelve years. He’s not thirteen anymore. 

“I’m not,” he says simply, and he can almost hear the way her eyes roll back when she thinks he’s lost his spine, so he continues, “My phone died. The car died. What was I supposed to do?” 

“Where are you?” 

“Lima.” He knows he’s being evasive. He knows she knows as well. 

“Blaine.” 

“I stayed with a friend,” he says. “I was safe.” 

Her voice is not unkind when she says, “You don’t have friends in Lima, B.” 

“We should pretend I do.” He stares out of the windshield at the coffee shop. Plain drip for him, with cinnamon. Drip coffee and a seat by the window, his blazer on the back of his chair and his homework in front of him, watching the students from the nearest high school come and go, waiting for someone - 

“Was it a boy?” his manager’s voice interrupts, and he starts at the noise. 

“No,” he says, and means it, and she says, her voice a warning this time, “B…” 

“He’s not a boy,” as if the semantics matter. 

“Did the car really break?” 

“Yes, Jesus.” 

He wonders when this became his life, and when he stopped smiling. He’d smiled last night and actually meant it, laughed like he hasn’t in far too long. When did that happen? 

“Okay. Just - get to the airport. I feel like you do this on purpose sometimes.” 

Blaine nods absently and removes the keys from the ignition. “I do it because I love when we have these conversations,” he says, and hangs up the phone. 

He knows he’ll have a lot of explaining to do eventually, but right now, he feels he has somewhere else he needs to be.  
  
  
  


He has two coffees in the cup holders in the car, and there’s a cookie in a bag on the passenger seat - 

(“Medium drip,” he’d said to the girl behind the counter, cute and blonde and wearing a hearing aid. 

“Anything else I can get for you?” she’d asked, and he nodded slowly, the words rising from the dregs of his memory and tripping from his tongue with an ease that they’d had no place having. 

“Yeah, I’ll get a grande nonfat mocha.” He’d offered a smile and then, “And one of those cookies. To go.” 

“Sure thing. Can I take your name?” 

“Blaine,” he’d said, and paid in cash.) 

\- and he’s speeding in the wrong direction for the airport, through tree-lined residential streets, past sleepy Saturday morning people walking their dogs before it gets hot, past his mom’s house and everything he’s fought to leave behind. 

_‘Do you even have time for coffee?’_

No, but - 

He’ll regret it if he doesn’t. 

Or he thinks he will, and that’s the same. Nearly the same. 

Kurt is just letting himself into his building when Blaine pulls his car into an empty space. There’s a small dog with him, and he looks smaller now, diminished. Blaine still feels his breath catch again, the way it had the night before, and he suddenly doesn’t know what to say. He knows this is a moment, though, and maybe the last one, so he grabs the coffees and the cookie and kicks the car door closed behind him. 

“Kurt,” he calls, and smiles when Kurt turns his head, as Kurt’s face runs the gamut of responses. He holds out the coffee once he’s close enough, and Kurt takes it tentatively, as if he expects his fingers will ghost straight through. As if he’s been here before, and woken sadder for it. 

“Coffee,” he says, staring at the lid. He winds his dog leash around his wrist and smiles, laughs a little. 

“Katy Perry,” Blaine says, and hums the opening bars of a song long forgotten, that he’d only sung once, for a cute boy in shorts. 

Kurt’s coffee hits the ground, and Blaine realises he doesn’t care. 

There is one thing, though, suddenly clear and bright and irrefutable, still here in Lima, Ohio. He didn’t know he was but the truth is crystal clear in his mind. 

“I’ve been looking for you forever,” he says.  
  
  
  


[FIN]


End file.
